William Stanley Haseltine Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

6-11-1835 Philadelphia, USA - 2-3-1900 Rome, ITA

William Stanley Haseltine father was a successful businessman, and his mother was an amateur landscape painter who he watched paint and had an influence on the young William. Haseltine attended the University of Pennsylvania and then went on to Harvard University, where he received his degree in 1854.

After graduating he exhibited his paintings the next year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He then decided to take a trip to Germany, first joining a group of American artists who were studying in Düsseldorf including Albert Bierstadt, and Worthington Whittredge. He then traveled down the Rhine River to Switzerland and from there to Italy, in late 1857 he decided to settle in Rome for a year and travel to southern Italy on painting excursions, his paintings of Capri and Sicily being popular with visiting American tourists on the grand tour of Italy.

In 1858 William Stanley Haseltine returned to Philadelphia, and by late 1859 was he got a studio apartment in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City, at that time a central hub for American landscape painters and members of the Hudson River School, also in the living and working there were Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Worthington Whittredge, the last two having gotten to know Haseltine in Europe. Haseltine also began to paint the seascapes of New England, especially the rock-bound coasts of Narragansett, Nahant and Mount Desert Island. The accuracy with which he painted these landscapes won him critical praise, and Haseltine was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1860, and a full Academician the following year.

In 1866 William Stanley Haseltine married and in 1867 they moved to Rome, and this became his home, from there he took further painting trips and painted in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the 1880s and 1890s. In his later years, he also returned to the United States, making a final trip to America in 1899.